26,000 Calif. teachers to get pink slips

March 14, 2009 12:00:00 AM PDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. --

In a spring rite that has become as predictable as the cherry blossoms in the nation's capital, public school employees throughout California have been warned of wrenching classroom cuts as districts face a deadline for issuing layoff notices. Most years many of those notices would be rescinded, but this year the ritual is more fraught with uncertainty because of the economy.

The state Department of Education estimates that preliminary pink slips will have been handed to 26,500 teachers by the Sunday cutoff - two-and-a-half times as many as were issued last year. Some 15,000 bus drivers, janitors, secretaries and administrators also were expected to receive the written warnings, said Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell.

Because of the state's less-than-rosy economic outlook, California's 1,000 K-12 school districts have been instructed to absorb more than $8 billion in funding cuts over the next year.

To draw attention to the situation, teachers and parents wore pink clothes and waved pink protest signs for a day California's largest teachers' union dubbed "Pink Friday."

Rosemarie Ochoa, a fifth-grade teacher who's in her third year with the San Lorenzo Unified School District, said she was pulled out of class Monday by a district official bearing a pink slip.

"I smiled at her because I knew what she was there for," said Ochoa, 28, who was among 76 of the district's 640 teachers who got a notice this week. "Then I had to go back to my students and retain my composure."

The second part of this annual ritual is that many, if not most, of the early layoff notices could end up being withdrawn by June, especially if the state can devote some of its federal stimulus money to education, officials said.

Six years ago, for example, all but 3,000 of the 20,000 teacher pink slips that went out statewide were rescinded.

O'Connell, who donned a pink tie for an appearance Friday at a school in San Jose, Allen At Steinbeck K-8, said it is unlikely that tens of thousands of teachers would be let go.

Still, he said, with so huge a budget gap to fill, schools would probably increase class sizes, reduce library hours and lose counselors.

And if voters do not approve the state spending package that will be the subject of a special election in May, schools would have to cut even more deeply and be unable to avert mass layoffs, O'Connell said.

"The cuts we are experiencing in public education are debilitating. These cuts have real consequences for real students," he said.

O'Connell, a Democrat who is considering a run for governor next year, said the dispiriting cycle would continue until state officials find a long-term and reliable way to pay for schools.

W. Norton Grubb, the director of a principal training program at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of "The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity," says years of uncertainty take their toll on schools even when layoffs do not come to pass.

"What is happening in these schools when the pink slips go out is everything stops, everyone is discouraged, everyone is busy worrying whether the money will come through, and all the efforts to get schools going basically grinds to a halt and remains ground to a halt for the rest of the spring," Grubb said. "A state that has these kind of crises year after year is really doing a poor job of planning."

Teachers, students and parents at Alhambra High School, in the eastern Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, were familiar with the Pink Friday routine from previous years. Some parents dropping off their children at school had pink paper taped to their car windows or honked to show their support for the 40 teachers who stood outside in pink wigs, bows and T-shirts.

Justin Li, a 17-year-old senior, photographed the protest for the school paper. The effects of the budget cuts have been noticeable, he said.

"We are seeing teachers being laid off year after year and we want to do something, because all the good teachers are leaving and more and more classes are being cut," Li said. "Teachers work too hard to lose their jobs."

The Alhambra district's budget has been cut by $6 million this school year and 38 teachers have received layoff notices, said Rosalyn Collier, vice president of the Alhambra Teachers Association.

"The cuts have left no wiggle room in the master schedule for the fall. Every class will be at 36 students and no less," said Kathleen Tar, an English teacher for 33 years. "So, if we have honors classes that do not meet 36, those classes will go away."

This week was the third time Steve Chambers, 47, a 5th-grade teacher at Allen At Steinbeck K-8 School in San Jose, has gotten a pink slip, but this is the first time that he has been truly worried. The economy is so bad everywhere, he has little confidence he would be able to get a teaching job elsewhere.

"It's irritating, the fact that I am an eight-year veteran and I could be out of a job for a year," said Chambers, who brought his class to listen to O'Connell's remarks.

Besides Chambers, Principal Nico Flores gave pink slips to four other teachers, one of his vice principals and a counselor. Flores said San Jose is better off than many school districts because it already had a spending freeze and has a large reserve fund, but he's still nervous.

"It's like crying wolf, crying wolf, and then suddenly the wolf is really coming and no one is listening," he said.